The One Function Twitter Desperately Needs

Photo: Ariel Zambelich / Wired

A staggering amount of misinformation spewed out of Twitter last week in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. There were reports of suspects being killed when they were very much alive, reports of arrests made while suspects were on the run, and worst, innocents had their names dragged through the mud by tens of thousands of otherwise well-intentioned people.

Twitter shouldn’t have to make sure everything crossing its servers is factual or true, but it is in Twitter’s interest to themselves to give us the tools to clean things up. Otherwise it risks becoming a cesspool of untruths and rumors. Twitter needs a way to reel bad information back in. It needs a way to let us flag things that we’ve said that turn out to be wrong. Twitter needs an edit button, a correction process.

I’m guilty of contributing to the problem. On Thursday night, when Boston was in lockdown as police chased suspects through the city, I tweeted the thing I likely regret the most in the six years I’ve used Twitter. I tweeted a man’s name, along with a vulgar expression of shock, that I thought had been attached to the Boston Marathon bombings. I followed that up with a link to an archived Facebook page. The name was one I wrongly believed had been sent out over the Boston Police Department Scanner. I was incredibly, shamefully wrong about that, and even more so to pass it along. I contributed to the despicable massively multiplayer online rumor mill that a missing Brown University student named Sunil Tripathi was in any way associated with acts of murder and violence. That I wasn’t alone only makes it worse.

Last week, Twitter was a breaking news machine. It’s done this before, of course, but this time given its growing size, the sensational nature of the crimes, and the fast-moving situation, it was on an entirely larger scale. But now that the dust has settled, we should come to grips with what happened. It’s a scale we need to get used to: This is the way it’s going to be from now on. The future of news dissemination is the crowd, or maybe even the mob.

There’s no retreating from this new reality. We are all going to muddle through live news together for the foreseeable future. You, me, Jake Tapper, some random guy on Reddit, everyone. The gates have been crashed. Breaking news has always been messy and hard, but now we’re all involved. And we could really use some better tools.

Here’s the problem with the way the current system works. Let’s say you tweet something that turns out to be incorrect to your 100 followers. Let’s say 5 of those retweet it to their 100 followers. At this point, some 595 potential people have seen it. (Or at least spambots, but bear with me.) You realize your error, and issue a correction on your Twitter feed. Your 100 original followers may see the update, but it leaves 495 who do not unless those same five people again retweet you.

In short, while the automatic retweet button on Twitter lets people spread information far and wide beyond your followers, there’s no way to makes sure those same people see your attempts to correct it.

There are also problems with simply deleting a tweet. When you delete a tweet, you are in effect hiding it. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there is no clear way for others to ascribe motive. Are you trying to conceal that you ever said such a thing, or are you just trying to prevent the further spread of inaccuracies? Should you preserve the record of your inaccuracy? Should you delete it and link to an archive of it? Despite seven long years of Twitter, there is still no standard practice.

Even old-fahioned print media still grapples with this stuff. How do you most effectively notify the audience of an error that happened yesterday, or last month, or two months ago? It had to evolve on the web as well. And while there’s still no standardized format for it, we have systems that roughly work. If you make a mistake, you typically own up to it on the same web page. At the very least, you eliminate the error. You make sure that your original error doesn’t remain out there, continuing to do harm.

But there’s no way to do that with a tweet. You can’t correct them. You can’t note what the original error was. Tweets just move on.

So here’s one way it could work using Twitter’s metadata. Twitter could add a function, similar to a retweet or favorite, that let you edit and correct a tweet after it had been posted. Those tweets then show up in a timeline as having been corrected–again, they could be flagged like favorites or retweets. Click on a tweet marked as edited, and it uses Twitter’s Cards function (the same system that lets tweets embed images, videos, and text) to show the original.

There’s another problem with a system like that, which is that given Twitter’s fast-flowing nature, tweets just vanish into the past. 1000 people may have seen the original, but as time passes the odds of anyone else viewing it (especially the original viewers) grows increasingly slim. That means once edited, a tweet ought to appear at the top of your timeline. Even better, the original author should have the option of notifying everyone who retweeted that there’s been a correction, which they could then publish to the top of their timelines with a single click. That gives them the option to push out the edited tweet to their followers, without forcing an update which seems like it could be ripe for abuse. (Imagine the original says “Tom is awesome.” Tom retweets this. You then edit and correct to say “Tom is an idiot,” which goes to everyone in his timeline.)

I’m sure this isn’t the only way to handle editing tweets, and it does not even address the problem of manual retweets. (Nor am I the first to call on Twitter to add a correction mechanism.) But it’s one way, and it possible. And it’s increasingly obvious as time goes on that Twitter needs something like this if its to remain something we turn to when messy fast-moving events take place.

Twitter has gone through this kind of evolutionary process before, and it resulted in verified accounts. Once, you couldn’t really tell if that person you were following was truly Vincent Gallo, or just a clever imitation. It remains an imperfect process, open to abuse and hacks and tomfoolery. But it largely accomplished its mission of reining in the wild west days of identity on Twitter and today you can be reasonably assured that if you follow someone verified, they are who they claim to be.

Update 13:32 pm: Shortly after this article went online, the Associated Press’ Twitter feed was apparently hacked, claiming there had been explosions in the White House and that President Barack Obama had been injured. The account was subsequently suspended, but not before the tweet itself was widely retweeted. While it’s unclear how the AP will handle it going forward, this seems like a prime example of a case where a corrected tweet that still preserved the original would be appropriate. The below is a screenshot of that tweet taken by Jeremy Jojola.

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